Here are the top two habits of successful entrepreneurs:
- They strategically set big and clear goals.
- They choose the right people.
Now, the ‘right team’ is not only the one that sits inside your office but also the one that works remotely on both administrative as well as non-administrative tasks. We are talking about virtual assistance provided by remote professionals who you can hire for a diverse set of roles. Hiring Virtual Assistants (Virtual Assistant) saves you time and allows you (and your team) to focus on core tasks to grow the business.
Hiring virtual assistants will help you fill both generic as well as niche roles. The best part? You no longer have to handle the burden of doing a mountain of tasks on your own.
Who is a Virtual Assistant?
A Virtual Assistant is a professional you hire to work remotely on administrative as well as non-administrative tasks. These professionals work exactly like the employees in your office do, they just do it out of it. You can hire them full-time or part-time, based on what your requirements are. They can take care of things like Digital Marketing, Secretarial tasks, Coding, SEO, and much more!
How Can Virtual Assistants Aid Your Business?
Are you looking to hire a virtual assistant? If so, here are the top tasks they can help you with:
Customer Service
Not many know this, but customer service is one of the first categories to be taken to virtual assistants on a large scale. Wondering why? Think about it! Your customers are interacting remotely with you, then why do you need an on-site customer service team.
Besides, big and small businesses discovered that most of their customers’ concerns hovered around things that could be quickly answered from a manual. Only a few customers needed special help or escalation to a call. Therefore, Virtual assistants were hired en masse to take care of petty customer grievances and to record feedback.
For instance, a small real estate company like Multimo hired a Virtual Assistant to provide its customers with after-sales support. By hiring real estate virtual assistants, they reduced their customer response time and freed up the core staff to do other work.
Accounts/ Bookkeeping
Bookkeeping is not an easy task. It requires expertise and can be excessively time-consuming. Even if you run a small business, your daily chores will comprise collecting bills, online invoice processing, creating a ledger, and much more. However, if you hire a virtual assistant, you will save a substantial amount of time each week to be put to good use.
For example, a boutique graphic design consultancy doesn’t want to hire a full-time accountant as chores like tax filing or investments are only done once a year. So, they decide to go with a part-time virtual assistant who works on specific tasks once a year. Needless to say, doing this saved them a significant amount of money in paychecks.
Schedule Management
Every entrepreneur – be it of a startup or an established enterprise needs secretarial help. Executive Assistants can help you with managing tasks such as maintaining your personal schedule, reminding you of appointments, taking calls on your behalf, booking your travel itinerary, and much more. Now, you can download software that can help with some of these chores, but it will never replace the human touch an Executive Assistant provides. In such a case, investing in a virtual assistant proves both effective and efficient.
Look at the case of the co-founders of a digital marketing agency. Since they are just starting up, they have frequent pitches and client calls. And it’s challenging to keep track. They need someone to look after their calendar and remind them of important dates, events, etc. So, they hire a Virtual Assistant and save their time and headspace preparing for pitches rather than remembering when they are.
Social Media Management
In today’s digital age, social media is a critical weapon in your marketing blueprint. After all, your present and potential customers are available to interact on various social media platforms. Hence, you don’t just need to have social media pages but also be proactive on them. How? By hosting live events, uploading education content, and interacting with both happy and angry customers.
However, if you keep doing this, it will take up a great deal of your time. But, a capable virtual assistant can really make your brand shine! It goes without saying that hiring one to influence social media in your favor will yield positive results.
For example, a small email marketing automation company hires a virtual assistant to spread the word about their social media software. The Virtual Assistant took this umbrella brief and created a strategy around content creation, scheduling posts, engaging with followers, hosting virtual events, and much more. Not only did they take the headache of social media management away from the core team, but they also helped the company save money on hiring a full-time employee whose work is perhaps only worth three days a week.
Online Research
Research is pretty integral to most companies – be it for product development, competition study, or any information that can help them grow. When you run a small business, you may not have enough time to conduct online research for 2 to 3 hours a day. A Virtual Assistant would become super useful here for you.
For instance, a small marketing agency requires secondary research on a customer brief to send a team in for fieldwork. So, they hire a virtual assistant and let them research the client’s brief topic and also scout ideal locations, accommodation for the fieldwork team. Such help saves time, money and also optimizes your overall fieldwork.
Conclusion
A virtual assistant can help you buy more time for core tasks and help you save on capital. These are critical, especially when your business is new. So, hire a virtual assistant, hand over a few aspects of your business to them, and find more hours in your day!
References:
- https://www.flexjobs.com/blog/post/companies-hiring-virtual-assistant-jobs-v2/
- https://biz30.timedoctor.com/what-does-a-virtual-assistant-do/
- https://avirtual.co.uk/10-crucial-tasks-your-business-can-outsource-to-virtual-assistants/
- https://blog.hubstaff.com/virtual-assistant-tasks/
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/theyec/2020/09/09/how-a-virtual-assistant-can-help-your-business-this-year/?sh=4076ee283182
Shalki Verma is a Digital Marketer by profession and a writer by passion. Bringing her knowledge and experience of working with a wide clientele, she dedicatedly takes care of social media management, blog strategy and editing, email marketing, content marketing and community management in her current role at Wishup.co.
In her free time, you would usually find her cooking, baking, reading and watching sports.
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